Joseph Campbell brought mythology to a mass audience. His bestselling
books, including The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand
Faces, are the rare blockbusters that are also scholarly classics.
While Campbell's work reached wide and deep as he covered the world's
great mythological traditions, he never wrote a book on goddesses in
world mythology. He did, however, have much to say on the subject.
Between 1972 and 1986 he gave over twenty lectures and workshops on
goddesses, exploring the figures, functions, symbols, and themes of the
feminine divine, following them through their transformations across
cultures and epochs.
In this provocative volume, editor Safron Rossi--a goddess studies
scholar, professor of mythology, and curator of collections at Opus
Archives, which holds the Joseph Campbell archival manuscript collection
and personal library--collects these lectures for the first time. In
them, Campbell traces the evolution of the feminine divine from one
Great Goddess to many, from Neolithic Old Europe to the Renaissance. He
sheds new light on classical motifs and reveals how the feminine divine
symbolizes the archetypal energies of transformation, initiation, and
inspiration.